


cleave

by Emeka



Series: 100 Fandoms Challenge [3]
Category: Baroque (Video Games)
Genre: Dependency, Gen, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-06
Updated: 2021-02-06
Packaged: 2021-03-16 14:34:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29208954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emeka/pseuds/Emeka
Summary: after the end.
Series: 100 Fandoms Challenge [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2134272
Kudos: 1





	cleave

The morning after he stared emptily up at the ceiling. He knew. Even before looking to his side, he knew. It was a twin sense, knowing through the absence in his bones and blood, through his heart thumping with new alacrity in his chest. They had been torn apart.

Over an indeterminable amount of time the pain-free haze in his body lightened, allowing him to move just a little. His fingers brushed on something unusual. It seemed to his mind that it was his own bone sticking out, the hip where they had been connected, shattered apart and left to dry in the air. In his haze he could not make out the specifics of the texture.

At night he could lift himself to see and horror clogged his throat. The space beside him where his brother always lay was now empty. Nothing but the sheets beneath. Knowing it was one thing, but to see it... he pulled down his blanket and saw, stared, at the thick stitching up his side in morbid fascination. The skin around it was red and inflamed, bunched-up like cloth caught on a bobbin needle. His vision swam. For a moment he thought he might faint.

The days after that blurred meaninglessly together. For much of it he had no choice over the care of his body, being both a child and the patient of a cult’s hospital. His parting wound was cleaned up, re-stitched, his body bathed under sponges and then in a tub when they took them out. They asked him about his pain but he felt little of it. He suspected the needles they kept sticking in his arms and the little spoons of bitter liquid they fed him had much to do with that. 

He wished they wouldn’t bother with any of it. They restrained him the few times he tried to fight it. Not in his mind, they said. The grief. He felt grief, but that wasn’t the reason behind anything. He was still alive at his brother’s expense. He might have no choice but to keep living, if they’ll force care on him, and to honor his brother’s life, but that did not mean living should be easy.

He wished he could have been awake when they were cleaved apart. He wishes he had been awake to the very end of their life together.

What pain he’d missed out on returned in some force during his physical therapy to get him walking. When they moved to giving him pills it was easier to pocket them. Many nights he lay awake sweaty and gasping through waves of agony in his knitting pelvis and exhausted legs. But it was good, it was right. The pain was preferable to being numb. It was remembering his brother’s existence, the only way he could think of besides to keep living, to memorialize him.

The pain became sweet. He could imagine a fraction of what being torn apart had been like.

His scar slowly closing had been a sad affair. Night by night he saw it smooth over where the separation had been, as though it was such a paltry matter. It felt like his own body conspiring against him to put the past behind them. He did not quite dare to tear open the stitches when he had them, but he pulled open on the lip of flesh like he has pulled open paper cuts to look at the meat inside. Eventually it healed entirely, though it was hard to call such a twisted mass of scar tissue ‘healed’ in any conventional sense. While it was no longer an active danger of infection or a hindrance to his mobility, he could still feel the stiffness, the ache, in his littlest movements.

Sweet and beautiful reminders in every twinge, like a prism of light going off in his body.


End file.
